'Million Dollar Quartet' cast member Levi Kreis shares the keyboard with Tony Awards host Sean Hayes at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday night. Kreis won the award for best featured actor in a musical for his role as Jerry Lee Lewis. (Photo by The Associated Press)

No huge surprises tonight, and only one obvious bit of pandering, rewarding the superstar power of Catherine Zeta-Jones for “A Little Night Music” after her performance earlier in the broadcast showed just how out of her league she is in this company.

I was rooting for Montego Glover of “Memphis.” But most everything else went as expected: The high-falutin’ art play, “Red,” won, as expected, for best new play, and “Memphis” won for best new musical. If “Fela” couldn’t win — and it couldn’t, since they took the critics’ votes away — I was just happy to see that “American Idiot” wasn’t wrongly coronated simply on the pure, discombobulating coolness that Green Day gave Broadway by bringing their hipster punk to Times Square. Each year, the Tony Awards show just how chronically insecure Broadway can be in terms of pop-culture coolness. But “American Idiot” oughtta come with a snot rag.

(By the way, if you want to see our first-hand reviews of “Memphis,” “Fela,” “American Idiot,” “Red,” “Next Fall” and others, well, here they are) .

Anyway, it’s been a long night so, for now, I’ll just pass on a few tidbits and local connections. Then I’ll run down the snarky firing synapses I made throughout the show and sent off via Twitter.Read more…